Between the Lines: "My back pages"

It seems awfully corny, but after I had just graduated from college and was starting my career as a teacher, I had an image of myself as a literary man. That was almost 40 years ago now.

My wife Charlene bought a large bookcase with two glass doors and an antique roll-top desk for me. She was kind enough to call the room they occupied my "study." I even had a corn-cob pipe, although I don't smoke. The pipe was something I used as a prop for the professorial image I was developing. If that idea seems silly now, it is only because I've lived long enough to be amused by my youthful pretensions. We all need them to some degree in order to grow up and get past them.

I began to fill the bookcase with 19th century volumes of American and British poetry. The books were leather-bound with gold embossing and their weightiness implied considerable learning. I read them self-consciously in my rocking chair as if I were auditioning for a part. I had the sinking feeling that the part had already been played out in old forgotten "B" movies. The poetry was agreeable, though, and suited me well. If nothing else, I taught myself a lot about Western literary heritage, and I put plenty of pleasant miles on the rocker. I would often read at night by candlelight, sometimes catching my reflection in the window -- not the literary man, but the young teacher with the earnest face.

Books meant so much to me because they were the foundation of my new adult self. The more of them I could bring into the house and read, the better I felt about my prospects. My family was solidly working class Irish-Catholic in the 1950s. As a group we tended to be suspicious of intellectuals and afraid of new ideas. Catholics weren't known as voracious readers, either, and when they did read, it was usually pietistic literature, prayer books, or the lives of the saints. There were two matching knotty pine bookcases flanking our brick fireplace at home. They held the family Bible, the Cub Scout handbook, a sky-blue 1957 Connecticut Registry, the biography of Knute Rockne, and a novel, Our Hearts were Young and Gay, which was the theme of Mother's senior class.

Lined up on the bottom shelf was our family's prized possession -- a complete set of Universal Standard Encyclopedias that we used for homework assignments on the pyramids and radio waves. The Catholic high schools and colleges in the '60s and '70s were way ahead of the antiquated aspects of parish life. I got a great education and introduction to the world of ideas in those schools. I discovered there was such a thing called literature and that books contained a wealth of knowledge and experience that went far beyond the confines of home and school. Although vision problems caused me to be an extremely slow reader, I realized, much to my surprise, that there was a bookish side to my nature. The games and sports of my boyhood gradually gave way to a deep hunger and intellectual curiosity that could only be sated by books and ideas.

It has often been said that Americans from P.T. Barnum to the Great Gatsby to Madonna reinvent themselves at will. I felt like I was gradually assembling the parts of my grown up life, but no matter how many pieces I accumulated, books always remained essential. My father never expected me, of all his five sons, to take an intellectual turn. He was amused by my choice and enjoyed calling me a dreamer, but I was never offended by his teasing. When the Irish bestow compliments, they are often accompanied by varying degrees of ridicule. In later years I wondered if Dad wasn't right. Perhaps I should have led a more active and competitive life, but it just wasn't in me. Books totally fit my meditative personality. I am also a "free thinker." as Dad also liked to tell me. Catholics, he well knew, didn't pride themselves on being called free thinkers.

Maybe there was a bit of the apostate in my wanting to join the tweedy WASP set at university and the great Jewish intellectuals whose work I admired. Their brilliance, discipline and vast knowledge so inspired me. I wanted to be able to quote poets and philosophers and construct fabulous narratives and dialectics. I wanted to wear my learning on my lapel and join the community of scholars and thinkers. I kept adding books to my shelves, arranging and rearranging them according to my interests at the moment. It was wonderful to have so many books! They spilled over into other rooms, and Charlene found more bookcases to contain them. I liked to walk from room to room, admiring the full shelves. They were a kind of anchor for me in the turmoil of American life. When I awoke in the morning, the sight of them reminded me of who I was.

It didn't take long before our home was crowded with books. Each time we moved I packed countless cardboard cartons full of them. Some I gave away; some were borrowed and never returned; some I lost along the way. And then there were periodic station wagon runs to Goodwill to free myself of the weight of so much fervor and illusion. As the decades passed, I realized that you can't really hold on to anything for long. I also understood that I couldn't establish an identity merely by cocooning myself in books. I'd seen enough dusty bookshelves at estate sales to realize the folly of believing that I was simply the sum total of my reading.

Something I never anticipated happening during my lifetime was that high culture and book reading would fade away. As a high school teacher, I am on the front line of observing this new phenomenon. The computer has changed everything, perhaps nothing more dramatic than the image of the literary man at home in his personal library contemplating the universe. The very idea of a classic literary heritage is extremely difficult to convey to students raised on the internet with its informational immediacy. The brightest and best of my students prefer reading screens, not books. Great literature is a curiosity reserved for libraries and antique shops. The virtual world is the only world for them.

As far as history goes, I think I bet on the wrong horse. The profession I devoted my life to will someday go the way of the passenger pigeon -- extinction. Of course, books aren't going to disappear overnight, and they will always have charm for some, but they are already becoming obsolete both in their literal form and the type of literary imagination they shaped. The world of technology is changing our language, our thought and way of communicating, our art, our schools and even our faith. We have a pop culture now that exists on the surface with very little depth beneath the obvious. In a few decades no one will even remember the difference. The role I created for myself worked for my lifetime, but it will have to be reinvented by others all too soon.

I probably have about 700 books left in my collection. I could easily part with half of them, but I would be loath to let the rest go. They are books that I live by and want near me for as long as I live. Recently I've been hearing about the new generation of "readers" like iPads, Kindles and Nooks. These electronic gadgets are not much bigger than a wallet and they can put whole libraries into the palm of your hand. I fooled around with one in a store recently. It felt odd to me with none of the texture and heft of a real book. I doubt I could get used to reading on such a small screen. And yet, if I had to, I could dispose of all my books and replace them with one little device. Talk about remarkable changes!

I briefly considered buying one and then came to this conclusion. Even if I have just one paperback of poems left as I sit by the river and dream, it will be enough for me. I'll leave the future to the young and turn my own back pages while I still can.

Barry Wallace writes a weekly column for the Fairfield Citizen.